Author: Rob Bensinger

Solve surnames with union names

Proposal: When you start a family, make up a new name, a union name. This name goes right before you and your partner’s/s’ different surnames, which are left unchanged. If you have children, this union name is then their surname.

… And we’re done. That’s the entire idea. You can probably just stop reading now.

OK, maybe I should say a little more about why this system is such an improvement on the status quo. What are the problems with other surname-swapping paradigms? What specific advantages do union names offer?

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Problems with existing systems

These are legion, so I’ll break them up into several categories. First, problems with meeting in the middle:

  • Combining names via hyphens isn’t sustainable. Mr. Gramolini-Bronkhorst marries Ms. Bennett-Moore and becomes Mr. Gramolini-Bronkhorst-Bennett-Moore. Next generation, it grows to 5 or more names. TERRIFYING.
  • Combining names frequently looks and sounds ugly. Surname phonology is not generally people’s main criterion in selecting mates.
  • Smushing surnames together is cute (Nilsen + Pattel = Paltsen) but often unpronounceable, and makes reconstructing the original names very difficult.
  • There’s still some lingering asymmetry and uncertainty in deciding whose name goes first. This isn’t trivial, because if you get to keep your name in roughly the same alphabetical position, you take on less of the social and professional cost of switching surnames.

Problems with having one partner switch to the other’s surname:

  • Making the woman always switch surnames is sexist and dehumanizing.
  • … Why even force people to have the discussion? Squeezing relationships into this asymmetric mold introduces pointless tension and conflict.

Problems with surname-changing in general:

  • Making either person switch surnames can harm careers and hinder social networking.
  • Making either person switch surnames can scramble bureaucracies — making medical records hard to find, for instance.
  • Surname-switching is extra confusing if you go through multiple partnerships/marriages.
  • Surname-switching is extra confusing if you find a new partner while you already have kids. Do your kids switch too?

Problems with leaving names completely unchanged:

  • If neither you nor your partner switch surnames, it’s hard to figure out what your child should be named.
  • If you just make up an arbitrary last name for your child, it won’t have a name in common with you, which makes identifying relatives (e.g., for legal guardian purposes) needlessly difficult.

Besides, all the existing systems are just boring. Why not have surnames actually bear some direct relevance to the individuals who have them?

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Advantages of union names

An invented example of how union names work: The Fairburn/Alexandros family tree.

Symbolism. Union names retain the ritual advantages of conventional marital name-changing. Unions do involve a name alteration, so the significance of the event is branded into your identity in a stable, concrete, visible way. At the same time, people who don’t want to change their names at all are free to skip that step and just use union names for their kids’ surnames. This sacrifices some of the system’s advantages, but a flexible system is a good system.

Moreover, it says something worth saying about consent, mutualism, and moral equality if the same name change is undergone by all partners, rather than the change being asymmetrically imposed on one partner by the other.

A name also has more personal significance if it’s lovingly crafted by partners, rather than being an arbitrary historical relic.

Creativity. You have more freedom to make mellifluous (and super badass) names for your kids — and for yourself — since you aren’t stuck with an inherited surname you have to work around.

Flexibility. Unions names are accessible to lesbian, gay, and queer couples; to polyamorous unions; and to serial unions.

Informativeness. Children and their parents always share at least one name, and in a systematic fashion that makes it easy to trace family trees if you aren’t missing any generations.

If you’ve had multiple independent unions, and don’t want to re-use the same union name for each, it’s easy to tell what order the unions came in (left-to-right yields chronological order), and also easy to tell which children are associated with which partnerships.

If you’re looking at a bunch of names in a family reunion roster, a Facebook thread, or an address book, it’s also easy to discern their familial relationships at a glance, assuming no incestuous unions. People sharing last names are siblings. People sharing middle names are spouses. And if Qiáng’s middle name is the same as George’s surname, then George is Qiáng’s child. (It’s a deliberate feature that sibling and spousal relationships are symmetric, while parental ones are asymmetric.)

As I conceive them, surnames will be more public and professional and official — hence you have them from birth to death, unless you go out of your way to change ’em — while union names would be more private and personal. A small family unit where the parents have union name Argestes (and therefore the children have Argestes as surname) might refer to itself as ‘clan Argestes’ or ‘the Argestes family’ in Christmas cards, whereas on census forms or medical documents it will just stick to individual surnames. It’s unfortunate that this system is very different from our current one, so it isn’t the easiest to transition into. But I think it’s the simplest option available, and the most sustainable.

(Edit: See Union Names: Objections and Replies for a follow-up.)

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 10

Listen and judge: An interview with Marwa Berro

I recently participated in a meeting of ex-Muslims in Washington, D.C., attended by Richard Dawkins, Ron Lindsay, and a number of other leaders of the secular movement. One of the most eloquent and passionate speakers there — rivaling Dawkins — was Marwa Berro, a writer, activist, and philosopher who blogs at Between A Veil And A Dark Place. At the prompting of event organizer Alishba Zarmeen, I asked Marwa about her views on Islam, cultural pluralism, and the future of secularism.

Bensinger: Marwa, you’ve written some really eye-opening critiques of Islamic culture. But you’ve also been quite critical of other critics of Islam. Do you see yourself as a Muslim? In dialogues about Islam, do you find yourself identifying more with Muslim voices, or with non-Muslim ones?

Berro: This question is to me not one of what I write about, the content and subject-matter of my work, but of what spurs that sort of work, a question of personal identity. I identify strongly as both ex-Muslim and Muslimish (the specific brand of Muslimish being atheist Muslim). One is a negative identity (ie, a descriptor of what I am not) and the other is a positive identity (a descriptor of something I am).  I think there are some potentially confusing things going on with that, so let me explain.

First, the identity of ex-Muslim: I refer to Islam, something I’ve rejected, to personally describe myself. While it might be confusing, I find this incredibly meaningful.

Because in shedding Islamic doctrine I have not freed myself of its influence on me. I can remove the hijab as clothing but I can’t so easily remove its decade-and-a-half influence on my body and mind. Its residual effects live within me in the form of memories, concepts, questions and challenges related to body image, bodily autonomy, self-worth, gender identity, sexuality and objectification. They live with me as active, probing, burning matters. They are internal struggles I bear myself through and external battles I commit my voice and pen and heart to.

They are the smallest and most everyday of things: My neck exploding in freckles this summer for the first time in my life: how strange it is to see your 24-year-old body do a thing it has never done, how alarming that so simple a capacity in your very skin could be released with a catalyst as common as the sun, how appalling that it has never had the chance to do so, and how the questions and emotions bubble up  from this. Every experience of mine that is new, joyous, painful, meaningful in some way or another resonates in a deep and compelling way with the life I’ve lived, the doctrine and culture that socialized me.

I am not just non-religious. I have shed the skin of a certain religion, and it was a clutching, shaping, smothering, burning, heavy skin, and my being non-religious is defined by pushing myself out of it, and it always will be.

I also identify as an atheist Muslim because I strongly claim my cultural belonging, and much of my culture is intertwined with, inextricable from, Islamic practices and beliefs. I am an atheist, a humanist, a secularist, yes, but much of what informs my thought and my work, and especially much of what moves me and gives me joy, comes from the heart of the Arab Mediterranean. It is a lens, if you will, for the way in which I experience the world.

Bensinger: So you see yourself as culturally Muslim or Muslimish, but not as religiously Muslim. I have vastly less experience with Islam’s culture than with its doctrines; how has that background shaped your perspective?

Berro: I’m an artist. In my day-to-day life, I write and teach fiction, and I am working on a book of interconnected short stories about my hometown Beirut, and the characters that live in my head and whose lives I spend time and words on have rich, complex, dynamic religious identities.  I watch news reports in Arabic on YouTube and yearn for the tongue. My head snaps around almost unbidden and my heart skips a beat if ever I hear somebody speak Arabic on the street here in the American Midwest. I’ve retained some traditionally Islamic practices, particularly hygienic ones, that I find to be valuable. I still celebrate Eid when Eid comes around too, in much the same way atheists from Christian families still celebrate Christmas—it has marked for me, twice every year, a time of food and family and love and friendship and commitment. I cook Levantine food, halal food, alongside my primary partner’s mother’s amazing pork chops. My sensory comforts are all from home: the sound and smell of the sea, warm weather. I still wear the same multicolored scarves with intricate designs that I used as hijabs for many years. I have a way of speech, a warmness and candor about me that is specifically Arab, because we are spontaneous, welcoming, open people. Strangely, even though I am a particularly amusical person, the poetry of the Husseini dirges during Ashouraa, their hypnotic chest-tapping grief, moves me to this day. I consider the story of Hussein to be an epic tale that, rendered in poetry in the Iraqi dialect, gives me a stronger feeling than reading epic tales like Beowulf or the Iliad ever did and ever could. I consider the stories of the prophets, and the tales of death and redemption and aid from angels tied to Hezbollah resistance culture in the South of Lebanon too, to be the equivalent of folktales that can inspire and inform new art, new fiction.

I love all of these things about my culture. I know my culture. I claim my culture, and speak of it from a position of belonging, not from the position of being a defector. It is true that I am not a Muslim—I am, however, Muslimish. Leaving Islam does not entail a separation from the cultural, societal, and political issues that have always shaped my very existence, whose intricacies I have delved in intellectually in order to find out who and what I am.

And when I go to sleep at night, it is always with the hope that I will dream of Beirut.

Bensinger: Given your background, Marwa, I can understand why your writing focuses on issues in Muslim communities. Still, looking at the hostility Western media often directs at Islam, don’t you think it’s unfair to single out this one religion for special criticism? Why not treat Islam the same as any other religion?

Berro: I do not believe Islam is singled out for criticism. If anything, there is less of a willingness to approach Islam with the same force and confidence that other religions are criticized with. The existence of a specific term demonizing the critique of Islam but no other term demonizing the critique of any other ideology or religion is very telling.

Bensinger: I assume you mean “Islamophobia“.

Berro: Yes. If the question is why I criticize Islam to the exclusion of other religions in my blogging, then the answer is simple.

I know more about it and can speak to it, and it is personally important to me. I can only speak about that which I am informed of. Likewise, I can speak best and most compellingly about that which touches me most.

The second part of the answer is that there is something unique about Islam. Islam does differ from other religions in crucial ways that do influence how it is to be dealt with. I have a blog post about that here.

Bensinger: In your view, what can moderate Muslims do to better combat extremism?

Berro: Value diversity. You interpret Islam in one way, and others interpret it in another, and others will interpret it in yet another, seventy times seven times. Thus concentrate less on defending the ‘true’ Islam because very, very few people are going to be talking about the same thing you are when you say ‘Islam’, and more on defending the right to believe and practice freely without imposing your view on others or infringing on their similar rights.

Emphasize that freedom of religion is a right, no matter how it is practiced or interpreted. That freedom is one that you yourself, as a Muslim, should value above all else.

I understand that you believe your faith to be a common good, a truth, a meaningful and enlightening thing, and that you hate seeing it denigrated either through misuse or misunderstanding. Perhaps consider that the best way to prevent this is to help create a world where nobody will have reason to denigrate your faith, because nobody will, in the name of your faith, commit the human rights violations that you consider to be misuse or misunderstanding of your faith. Recognize that those who kill or maim or hurt to defend the name of your faith do so because they don’t believe it is a human right for others to choose not to follow it or to flout its rules or beliefs.

Emphasize that human right.

Value diversity. Value choice.

Bensinger: What can we do to empower ex-Muslim and liberal Muslim critics of traditional Islam?

Berro: Listen to us. Enable our voices by hosting them on mainstream media platforms. Help make the ex-Muslim voice and the liberal Muslim voice normalized, because it is unfortunately the case that these voices are considered inauthentic and thus discounted because we are not viewed as Muslims or ‘true’ Muslims. This happens in the West sometimes because of a fear, I think, of cultural appropriation, of being racist.

But here’s the thing. There is so much talk of what we are not. We are not meant for your consumption, we are not your orientalist dream. Clamorous are the voices that say this. But tenuous is the discourse that is willing to discuss what is ours, what we can have, what can be fought for on our behalf if we do not have the means to fight for it ourselves, if it is not already granted to us by our cultural norms.

The discourse surrounding cultural appropriation powerfully rests upon the simple concept, acknowledged by many and addressed to the white West, that when you view what is ours through the lens of your own privileged understanding, you bar us from agency and choice and self-determination.

But when does the fear of cultural appropriation blend into the dangers of cultural relativism?

When it starts to enable our belonging to a cultural tradition above our individual identities. Except that we are human subjects, and our cultures belong to us more than we belong to them.

It becomes dangerous when talk of what we are not enables the delegitimization of our voices when we try to speak of what we are, what we can have. When suddenly we become defectors, apostates, and our discourse is discounted as imperialist Western brainwashing.

The irony is that we are not given that power, of the agential voice. We are not considered to be appropriating Western values when we endorse and adopt them, because to suggest that a brown woman can take Western ideas and turn them into her own brand of feminism and agency is unthinkable. Instead our discourse is thought of being a flimsy vapid imitation of the West. It comes as a surprise to some Westerners if and when we end up educated enough to teach white children their own languages, if our English is impeccable, our diction refined, our knowledge of Western identity and gender politics well-formulated.

And once accepted, this somehow discredits us as brown women, as people from Muslim cultures. We are discounted as inauthentic commentators on what was always-and-every issue governing our socialization, our actualization, our politicization because we break out of the bounds of our cultural dictates in doing so.

And when we are discounted by our cultural leaders and spaces, a fear of cultural appropriation bars us from having a platform from which to speak elsewhere.

This stems from a fear of judging. Is it then possible that in order to not judge, people tend not to listen?

So listen to us. Listen to us, understand us, ask us questions, let us teach you about our religious backgrounds so that you too can become informed commentators and help us dispel the erroneous and focus on effective solutions.

Help make it a normal thing, a universally acknowledged and accepted thing for an ex-Muslim to speak about Islam and be considered a valuable and informed commentator.

We need your help in being heard.

Bensinger: Why is help needed? Why do I hear so few people talking like this?

Berro: We are black sheep. We are rejected by many of the people and organizations that socialized us. Those of us who are public are accused of being imperialist tools of the West, of getting paychecks from Zionist organizations, of being part of a larger agenda of globalization and other such ludicrous nonsense.

Also, and this is sickening, horrifying, the women among us are often subjected to the crudest forms of misogynistic threats of rape and violence for daring to advocate for human rights. Our causes are routinely reduced to a desire to legalize sin and fornication and lewdness (all imagined evils) and any humanistic values we endorse are brushed aside as a mere front.

Many of us are also in hiding, and bear significant social and material costs for being what we are. Apostasy bears a great social burden in Muslim societies. At the very least, we are shunned, outcast, disowned if we were to go public. Others of us simply cannot. We live in places with such inescapable codes of living that we are not free to choose a nonreligious life and must continue to practice rituals of faith as though we believed, and are thus forced to suppress ourselves, and live a lie.

Others who are less lucky suffer violence in brutal ways as the recompense for sin. In many areas of the Muslim world, death is called for as the just punishment for apostasy. In other places, death or brutalization as punishment for apostasy is not technically legal but is overlooked when it does happen. The acceptance of it is surprisingly (or not) mainstream, as this Pew Poll shows.

I will quickly here note that both I and some close friends have suffered unjustifiable violence at the hands of our own families in response to perceived ‘sin’ we committed.

And for those of us who are capable of speaking—our voices aren’t loud enough on their own to cast light onto the invisible, in-the-closet apostate from Islam that has no recourse and is trapped in a way of life they cannot adhere to with good conscience and find too dangerous or costly to leave.

Bensinger: What about voices from outside the Muslim world? What can people from more secularized cultures do to effectively criticize religion?

Berro: I view the issue of secularism to be one of practical political philosophy, and when it comes to practical political philosophy, I am a moral consequentialist who emphasizes procedure. Based on that, these are my suggestions:

  • Ask yourself why you are criticizing religion. What is your purpose, goal? What valuable thing are you trying to achieve in criticizing a religion? And then line up the manner in which you critique religion with those goals. Look at what you’re doing already and ask yourself if it serves those goals and how. For instance, questions to be posed could be: How would using racializing, generalizing, stereotyping, alienating, or aggressive language achieve any of those goals? Conversely, how would being too afraid of being accused of xenophobia or bigotry to make an honest, compelling, no-nonsense critique serve those goals?
  • Stop making the mistake of separating the practices and beliefs of followers of a religion from the religion itself. That’s a cop-out that detracts from honest criticism of the ways in which religious doctrine informs, influences, and contributes to violence and human rights violations committed by religious people.
  • Be less concerned with the image of a religion, and what the ‘real’ or ‘true’ version of a religion is, and more about dealing with the real-world consequences of the actions of its followers. People are more valuable than ideas. People’s lives and wellbeing and freedom and safety are more valuable than defending or condemning an abstract concept. Here’s a hint: Nobody agrees on what the ‘true’ version of a religion is. It does not exist.
  • Don’t treat religions as monoliths. They are not monoliths. They are the incredibly varying beliefs and practices of their followers, and in order to effectively discuss them, you must discuss them according to their semantic content and their material effects. You must not equate them with each other or reduce them to either their most positive aspects or their most negative aspects. You must not lump them all together and treat them the same. Islam is different from other religions in many ways, and those differences need to be addressed when we think about how to discuss Islam. You will not fix a problem by ignoring its particular identifying characteristics.

Here are some concrete suggestions I’ve given for discussing Islam in particular.

Bensinger: Why does the issue of secularism matter? What does it mean for a society to be secular, or for an individual to be a secularist?

Berro: As commonly understood, a secular society is one in which religious institutions and the state are separate, neither interfering with the functioning of the other. It relates directly to freedom, the freedom to conduct yourself and believe what you will, insofar as that does not infringe upon the freedom of others.

It matters because societies are pluralistic. Because there is a large variety of personally fulfilling ways of living decent human lives, and no single one of these can be mandated at the level of the state. It matters because the followers of certain belief systems do want to be allowed to bring their own codes of living into public spaces where other people live.

Many religions tend to want to dictate an objective, universal code of living and belief system for humanity in general, and if they are allowed to pass legislature at the state level that enforce their particular system of belief upon others, then they will be infringing upon the the fundamental human right of self-determination.

It can range from less dangerous to more dangerous things: A comparatively benign example is holding prayer in public or state schools even if the children do not belong to that religion or do not desire to be brought into it and do not wish to pray to a god they don’t believe in or in a manner that they don’t subscribe to. More extreme is sentencing a woman who has had sex to 100 lashes because in a particular religion it is considered immoral to have sex outside of marriage.

A particular problem I’ve noticed when considering personal autonomy and freedom of religion is the tendency to discount religious influence on legislature because it is not explicitly presented as such. For instance, my home country Lebanon, which endorses no state religion and considers itself secular, has a slew of laws that are not justified in explicitly religious terms but that only exist because of religious influences on the culture. For instance, a law condemning ‘unnatural’ sex acts and thus used to arrest LGBTQ individuals. Or the repeated vetoing of a law criminalizing domestic violence based on the justification that it threatens the closeness of familial bonds.

Thus the various influences and justifications for legislature must be examined, along with whether they are based in a particular worldview that infringes upon the rights of others and is inconsistent with the existence of others. That should be the standard for whether or not legislature is secular: is it consistent with the existence of various worldviews given that no human rights are being violated?

Bensinger: The Washington, D.C. event was the first large-scale Muslimish meet-up of its kind. What did you think of it?

Berro: It was a life-changing experience for me.

Firstly, because of community:

One thing that apostates can often be heard voicing is ‘I thought I was alone.’

The concept of apostasy is so demonized and unthinkable that it sometimes is difficult for those bearing its social costs to consider that there might be others like them, a community, that they can reach out to, talk to, support and feel supported by.

I’ve been collaborating and sharing experience and insight and dreams and hopes with an online network of apostates in North America for the past few months, but the meetup in DC at the end of this past September was a thing of joy and splendor for me. I felt a sense of community, belonging, solidarity, of encompassing and welcoming that I have not felt in a long time. These were people with similar struggles, similar experiences of adversity, similar intellectual journeys and interests. I could speak my language again. I could refer to specific cultural things, have inside jokes, that other people understood and we could discuss them in open, versatile ways, without fear of being quieted or punished or being accused of an imagined crime called ‘blasphemy’.

Because our pains were similar, we could understand and comfort each other in unique ways. Because our joys, too, were things we had in common, as well as the experiences of leaving Islamic rituals behind and experiencing new things like intimate relationships, the sun on our hair, swimming in public, eating bacon for the first time as adults. That it was forbidden to us for so long made it sacred to us in a way that we probably would be at loss to explain to others.

I was also struck, and really am almost ashamed of how surprising this was for me, by how respectful and nonjudgmental everyone around me was. I have never been utterly surrounded by people from strong Muslim cultures without feeling controlled or judged or manipulated in some way, especially by men. But I was there with my primary partner and we were at a raging afterparty with booze and cuddles and romance all around and I did not feel a shred of shaming or misogyny directed at my immodest dress and conduct. It was heartwarming and nearly brought me to tears.

Secondly, because of the amazing amount of goodwill and human kindness we were given.

We met with prominent leaders of secular organizations nationally and worldwide. Present were Richard Dawkins, Edwina Rogers (Secular Coalition for America and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science), Ronald A Lindsay (Center for Inquiry), Richard Haynes (Atheist Nexus), and Jennifer Beahan (also CFI, in collaboration with Muslimish, which is now an official chapter of CFI).

Leaders from these organizations came to meet us in DC specifically to discuss the ways in which they could help us. How they could support us, what they could offer us. How the larger secular community as a whole could support the Muslim apostate cause.

It was made very clear that we belonged, that they considered our plight crucial, and that we were to be welcomed as an integral part of the secular community.

Also, and I say this because of the stigma attached to apostasy and its inherent voicelessness, it is incredible how we were listened to.

We were not spoken at. We were not given terms or conditions. We were offered several avenues of help, and given suggestions for ways in which we could be supported, and then we were asked.

We were asked what we thought could be done for us. We were asked what aspects of the apostate condition we thought were most crucial, and what ideas we had for addressing us.

Although we were well over 100 strong in the room, we were all given opportunity to ask questions of the secular leaders before us, and give them comments and feedback.

Bensinger: What were the most important issues and ideas you encountered there?

Berro: Some specific issues we talked about were:

  • The unique situation of women from Muslim cultures, because they are the largest sufferers under Islamism, and enabling the voices of ex-Muslim women, and broadcasting their experiences. Since then, a project called the Ex-Muslim Women’s Network has gone through several planning stages.
  • The situation of apostates in Muslim-majority countries, and strategies for creating places of freethought and skeptical inquiry where they feel welcome that are safe, undetectable, and sustainable.
  • The situation of seekers of asylum and refugees who happen to be atheists or apostates, who often lack sponsors or legal support from secular organizations, and thus have to be sponsored by religious organizations such as the YMCA.
  • The situation of reconciling positive cultural elements with a lack of faith, methods for creating families and communities that retain culture while shedding the religious doctrine and terminology.
  • The situation of apostates in the West, who often are utterly socially constrained, bringing them awareness that they are not alone, and helping them leave suppressive home situations.

Bensinger: I found the meeting moving and inspiring as well. For that matter, this discussion has given me a lot of new hope, new understanding, and a renewed sense of urgency. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself, Marwa. Is there a last word you’d like to share with people reading this? Any new projects, or ways for us to follow your work?

Berro: I’d like to conclude with a shout-out to EXMNA. Since our DC meetup, the Ex-Muslims of North America has launched the Ex-Muslim Blogs, the world’s first single website that acts as a unified platform for ex-Muslim thought in all its rich variety and insight. I think this an incredibly revolutionary and important endeavor, and am proud to have Between A Veil and A Dark Place hosted there; it is the beginning of the normalization of the ex-Muslim voice. And finally, I’d like to mention that I’m collecting stories and experiences from ex-Muslim women or women who have been influenced in one way or another by Muslim societies for a new guest-blog series at my website, the Stories from Ex-Muslim Women. Feel free to query me at aveilandadarkplace@gmail.com.

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 8

The seed is not the superintelligence

This is the conclusion of a LessWrong post, following The AI Knows, But Doesn’t Care.

If an artificial intelligence is smart enough to be dangerous to people, we’d intuitively expect it to be smart enough to know how to make itself safe for people. But that doesn’t mean all smart AIs are safe. To turn that capacity into actual safety, we have to program the AI at the outset — before it becomes too fast, powerful, or complicated to reliably control — to already care about making its future self care about safety.

That means we have to understand how to code safety. We can’t pass the entire buck to the AI, when only an AI we’ve already safety-proofed will be safe to ask for help on safety issues! Generally: If the AI is weak enough to be safe, it’s too weak to solve this problem. If it’s strong enough to solve this problem, it’s too strong to be safe.

This is an urgent public safety issue, given the five theses and given that we’ll likely figure out how to make a decent artificial programmer before we figure out how to make an excellent artificial ethicist.

File:Ouroboros-Zanaq.svg

The AI’s trajectory of self-modification has to come from somewhere.

“Take an AI in a box that wants to persuade its gatekeeper to set it free. Do you think that such an undertaking would be feasible if the AI was going to interpret everything the gatekeeper says in complete ignorance of the gatekeeper’s values? […] I don’t think so. So how exactly would it care to follow through on an interpretation of a given goal that it knows, given all available information, is not the intended meaning of the goal? If it knows what was meant by ‘minimize human suffering’ then how does it decide to choose a different meaning? And if it doesn’t know what is meant by such a goal, how could it possible [sic] convince anyone to set it free, let alone take over the world?”
               —Alexander Kruel
“If the AI doesn’t know that you really mean ‘make paperclips without killing anyone’, that’s not a realistic scenario for AIs at all–the AI is superintelligent; it has to know. If the AI knows what you really mean, then you can fix this by programming the AI to ‘make paperclips in the way that I mean’.”
               —Jiro

The wish-granting genie we’ve conjured — if it bothers to even consider the question — should be able to understand what you mean by ‘I wish for my values to be fulfilled.’ Indeed, it should understand your meaning better than you do. But superintelligence only implies that the genie’s map can compass your true values. Superintelligence doesn’t imply that the genie’s utility function has terminal values pinned to your True Values, or to the True Meaning of your commands.

The critical mistake here is to not distinguish the seed AI we initially program from the superintelligent wish-granter it self-modifies to become. We can’t use the genius of the superintelligence to tell us how to program its own seed to become the sort of superintelligence that tells us how to build the right seed. Time doesn’t work that way.

We can delegate most problems to the FAI. But the one problem we can’t safely delegate is the problem of coding the seed AI to produce the sort of superintelligence to which a task can be safely delegated.

When you write the seed’s utility function, you, the programmer, don’t understand everything about the nature of human value or meaning. That imperfect understanding remains the causal basis of the fully-grown superintelligence’s actions,long after it’s become smart enough to fully understand our values.

Why is the superintelligence, if it’s so clever, stuck with whatever meta-ethically dumb-as-dirt utility function we gave it at the outset? Why can’t we just pass the fully-grown superintelligence the buck by instilling in the seed the instruction: ‘When you’re smart enough to understand Friendliness Theory, ditch the values you started with and just self-modify to become Friendly.’?

Because that sentence has to actually be coded in to the AI, and when we do so, there’s no ghost in the machine to know exactly what we mean by ‘frend-lee-ness thee-ree’. Instead, we have to give it criteria we think are good indicators of Friendliness, so it’ll know what to self-modify toward. And if one of the landmarks on our ‘frend-lee-ness’ road map is a bit off, we lose the world.

Yes, the UFAI will be able to solve Friendliness Theory. But if we haven’t already solved it on our own power, we can’tpinpoint Friendliness in advance, out of the space of utility functions. And if we can’t pinpoint it with enough detail to draw a road map to it and it alone, we can’t program the AI to care about conforming itself with that particular idiosyncratic algorithm.

Yes, the UFAI will be able to self-modify to become Friendly, if it so wishes. But if there is no seed of Friendliness already at the heart of the AI’s decision criteria, no argument or discovery will spontaneously change its heart.

And, yes, the UFAI will be able to simulate humans accurately enough to know that its own programmers would wish, if they knew the UFAI’s misdeeds, that they had programmed the seed differently. But what’s done is done. Unless we ourselves figure out how to program the AI to terminally value its programmers’ True Intentions, the UFAI will just shrug at its creators’ foolishness and carry on converting the Virgo Supercluster’s available energy into paperclips.

And if we do discover the specific lines of code that will get an AI to perfectly care about its programmer’s True Intentions, such that it reliably self-modifies to better fit them — well, then that will just mean that we’ve solved Friendliness Theory. The clever hack that makes further Friendliness research unnecessary is Friendliness.

Not all small targets are alike.

“You write that the worry is that the superintelligence won’t care. My response is that, to work at all, it will have to care about a lot. For example, it will have to care about achieving accurate beliefs about the world. It will have to care to devise plans to overpower humanity and not get caught. If it cares about those activities, then how is it more difficult to make it care to understand and do what humans mean? […]
“If an AI is meant to behave generally intelligent [sic] then it will have to work as intended or otherwise fail to be generally intelligent.”
            —Alexander Kruel

It’s easy to get a genie to care about (optimize for) something-or-other; what’s hard is getting one to care about the right something.

‘Working as intended’ is a simple phrase, but behind it lies a monstrously complex referent. It doesn’t clearly distinguish the programmers’ (mostly implicit) true preferences from their stated design objectives; an AI’s actual code can differ from either or both of these. Crucially, what an AI is ‘intended’ for isn’t all-or-nothing. It can fail in some ways without failing in every way, and small errors will tend to kill Friendliness much more easily than intelligence.

It may be hard to build self-modifying AGI. But it’s not the same hardness as the hardness of Friendliness Theory. Being able to hit one small target doesn’t entail that you can or will hit every small target it would be in your best interest to hit. Intelligence on its own does not imply Friendliness. And there are three big reasons to think that AGI may arrive before Friendliness Theory is solved:

(i) Research Inertia. Far more people are working on AGI than on Friendliness. And there may not come a moment when researchers will suddenly realize that they need to take all their resources out of AGI and pour them into Friendliness. If the status quo continues, the default expectation should be UFAI.

(ii) Disjunctive Instrumental Value. Being more intelligent — that is, better able to manipulate diverse environments — is of instrumental value to nearly every goal. Being Friendly is of instrumental value to barely any goals. This makes it more likely by default that short-sighted humans will be interested in building AGI than in developing Friendliness Theory. And it makes it much likelier that an attempt at Friendly AGI that has a slightly defective goal architecture will retain the instrumental value of intelligence than of Friendliness.

(iii) Incremental Approachability. Friendliness is an all-or-nothing target. Value is fragile and complex, and a half-good being editing its morality drive is at least as likely to move toward 40% goodness as 60%. Cross-domain efficiency, in contrast, is not an all-or-nothing target. If you just make the AGI slightly better than a human at improving the efficiency of AGI, then this can snowball into ever-improving efficiency, even if the beginnings were clumsy and imperfect. It’s easy to put a reasoning machine into a feedback loop with reality in which it is differentially rewarded for being smarter; it’s hard to put one into a feedback loop with reality in which it is differentially rewarded for picking increasingly correct answers to ethical dilemmas.

The ability to productively rewrite software and the ability to perfectly extrapolate humanity’s True Preferences are two different skills. (For example, humans have the former capacity, and not the latter. Most humans, given unlimited power, would be unintentionally Unfriendly.)

It’s true that a sufficiently advanced superintelligence should be able to acquire both abilities. But we don’t have them both, and a pre-FOOM self-improving AGI (‘seed’) need not have both. Being able to program good programmers is all that’s required for an intelligence explosion; but being a good programmer doesn’t imply that one is a superlative moral psychologist or moral philosopher.

If the programmers don’t know in mathematical detail what Friendly code would even look like, then the seed won’t be built to want to build toward the right code. And if the seed isn’t built to want to self-modify toward Friendliness, then the superintelligence it sproutsalso won’t have that preference, even though — unlike the seed and its programmers — the superintelligence does have the domain-general ‘hit whatever target I want’ ability that makes Friendliness easy.

And that’s why some people are worried.

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 76

The AI knows, but doesn’t care

This is the first half of a LessWrong post. For background material, see A Non-Technical Introduction to AI Risk and Truly Part of You.

I summon a superintelligence, calling out: ‘I wish for my values to be fulfilled!’

The results fall short of pleasant.

Gnashing my teeth in a heap of ashes, I wail:

Is the artificial intelligence too stupid to understand what I meant? Then it is no superintelligence at all!

Is it too weak to reliably fulfill my desires? Then, surely, it is no superintelligence!

Does it hate me? Then it was deliberately crafted to hate me, for chaos predicts indifference. ———But, ah! no wicked god did intervene!

Thus disproved, my hypothetical implodes in a puff of logic. The world is saved. You’re welcome.

On this line of reasoning, safety-proofed artificial superintelligence (Friendly AI) is not difficult. It’s inevitable, provided only that we tell the AI, ‘Be Friendly.’ If the AI doesn’t understand ‘Be Friendly.’, then it’s too dumb to harm us. And if it does understand ‘Be Friendly.’, then designing it to follow such instructions is childishly easy.

The end!

… …

Is the missing option obvious?

What if the AI isn’t sadistic, or weak, or stupid, but just doesn’t care what you Really Meant by ‘I wish for my values to be fulfilled’?

When we see a Be Careful What You Wish For genie in fiction, it’s natural to assume that it’s a malevolent trickster or an incompetent bumbler. But a real Wish Machine wouldn’t be a human in shiny pants. If it paid heed to our verbal commands at all, it would do so in whatever way best fit its own values. Not necessarily the way that best fits ours.

Is indirect indirect normativity easy?

“If the poor machine could not understand the difference between ‘maximize human pleasure’ and ‘put all humans on an intravenous dopamine drip’ then it would also not understand most of the other subtle aspects of the universe, including but not limited to facts/questions like: ‘If I put a million amps of current through my logic circuits, I will fry myself to a crisp’, or ‘Which end of this Kill-O-Zap Definit-Destruct Megablaster is the end that I’m supposed to point at the other guy?’. Dumb AIs, in other words, are not an existential threat. […]

“If the AI is (and always has been, during its development) so confused about the world that it interprets the ‘maximize human pleasure’ motivation in such a twisted, logically inconsistent way, it would never have become powerful in the first place.”

—Richard Loosemore

If an AI is sufficiently intelligent, then, yes, it should be able to model us well enough to make precise predictions about our behavior. And, yes, something functionally akin to our own intentional strategy could conceivably turn out to be an efficient way to predict linguistic behavior. The suggestion, then, is that we solve Friendliness by method A —

  • A. Solve the Problem of Meaning-in-General in advance, and program it to follow our instructions’real meaning. Then just instruct it ‘Satisfy my preferences’, and wait for it to become smart enough to figure out my preferences.

— as opposed to B or C —

  • B. Solve the Problem of Preference-in-General in advance, and directly program it to figure out what our human preferences are and then satisfy them.
  • C. Solve the Problem of Human Preference, and explicitly program our particular preferences into the AI ourselves, rather than letting the AI discover them for us.

But there are a host of problems with treating the mere revelation that A is an option as a solution to the Friendliness problem.

1. You have to actually code the seed AI to understand what we mean. You can’t just tell it ‘Start understanding the True Meaning of my sentences!’ to get the ball rolling, because it may not yet be sophisticated enough to grok the True Meaning of ‘Start understanding the True Meaning of my sentences!’.

2. The Problem of Meaning-in-General may really be ten thousand heterogeneous problems, especially if ‘semantic value’ isn’t a natural kind. There may not be a single simple algorithm that inputs any old brain-state and outputs what, if anything, it ‘means’; it may instead be that different types of content are encoded very differently.

3. The Problem of Meaning-in-General may subsume the Problem of Preference-in-General. Rather than being able to apply a simple catch-all Translation Machine to any old human concept to output a reliable algorithm for applying that concept in any intelligible situation, we may need to already understand how our beliefs and values work in some detail before we can start generalizing. On the face of it, programming an AI to fully understand ‘Be Friendly!’ seems at least as difficult as just programming Friendliness into it, but with an added layer of indirection.

4. Even if the Problem of Meaning-in-General has a unitary solution and doesn’t subsume Preference-in-General, it may still be harder if semantics is a subtler or more complex phenomenon than ethics. It’s not inconceivable that language could turn out to be more of a kludge than value; or more variable across individuals due to its evolutionary recency; or more complexly bound up with culture.

5. Even if Meaning-in-General is easier than Preference-in-General, it may still be extraordinarily difficult. The meanings of human sentences can’t be fully captured in any simple string of necessary and sufficient conditions. ‘Concepts‘ are just especially context-insensitive bodies of knowledge; we should not expect them to be uniquely reflectively consistent, transtemporally stable, discrete, easily-identified, or introspectively obvious.

6. It’s clear that building stable preferences out of B or C would create a Friendly AI. It’s not clear that the same is true for A. Even if the seed AI understands our commands, the ‘do’ part of ‘do what you’re told’ leaves a lot of dangerous wiggle room. See section 2 of Yudkowsky’s reply to Holden. If the AGI doesn’t already understand and care about human value, then it may misunderstand (or misvalue) the component of responsible request- or question-answering that depends on speakers’ implicit goals and intentions.

7. You can’t appeal to a superintelligence to tell you what code to first build it with.

The point isn’t that the Problem of Preference-in-General is unambiguously the ideal angle of attack. It’s that the linguistic competence of an AGI isn’t unambiguously the right target, and also isn’t easy or solved.

Point 7 seems to be a special source of confusion here, so I’ll focus just on it for my next post.

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 5

A non-technical introduction to AI risk

In the summer of 2008, experts attending the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference assigned a 5% probability to the human species’ going extinct due to “superintelligent AI” by the year 2100. New organizations, like the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, are springing up to face the challenge of an AI apocalypse. But what is artificial intelligence, and why do people think it’s dangerous?

As it turns out, studying AI risk is useful for gaining a deeper understanding of philosophy of mind and ethics, and a lot of the general theses are accessible to non-experts. So I’ve gathered here a list of short, accessible, informal articles, mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, to serve as a philosophical crash course on the topic. The first half will focus on what makes something intelligent, and what an Artificial General Intelligence is. The second half will focus on what makes such an intelligence ‘friendly‘ — that is, safe and useful — and why this matters.

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Part I. Building intelligence.

An artificial intelligence is any program or machine that can autonomously and efficiently complete a complex task, like Google Maps, or a xerox machine. One of the largest obstacles to assessing AI risk is overcoming anthropomorphism, the tendency to treat non-humans as though they were quite human-like. Because AIs have complex goals and behaviors, it’s especially difficult not to think of them as people. Having a better understanding of where human intelligence comes from, and how it differs from other complex processes, is an important first step in approaching this challenge with fresh eyes.

1. Power of Intelligence. Why is intelligence important?

2. Ghosts in the Machine. Is building an intelligence from scratch like talking to a person?

3. Artificial Addition. What can we conclude about the nature of intelligence from the fact that we don’t yet understand it?

4. Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. How do human goals relate to the ‘goals’ of evolution?

5. The Blue-Minimizing Robot. What are the shortcomings of thinking of things as ‘agents’, ‘intelligences’, or ‘optimizers’ with defined values/goals/preferences?

Part II. Intelligence explosion.

Forecasters are worried about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an AI that, like a human, can achieve a wide variety of different complex aims. An AGI could think faster than a human, making it better at building new and improved AGI — which would be better still at designing AGI. As this snowballed, AGI would improve itself faster and faster, become increasingly unpredictable and powerful as its design changed. The worry is that we’ll figure out how to make self-improving AGI before we figure out how to safety-proof every link in this chain of AGI-built AGIs.

6. Optimization and the Singularity. What is optimization? As optimization processes, how do evolution, humans, and self-modifying AGI differ?

7. Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization. What is intelligence?

8. The Design Space of Minds-In-General. What else is universally true of intelligences?

9. Plenty of Room Above Us. Why should we expect self-improving AGI to quickly become superintelligent?

Part III. AI risk.

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it’s better for both players to cooperate than for both to defect; and we have a natural disdain for human defectors. But an AGI is not a human; it’s just a process that increases its own ability to produce complex, low-probability situations. It doesn’t necessarily experience joy or suffering, doesn’t necessarily possess consciousness or personhood. When we treat it like a human, we not only unduly weight its own artificial ‘preferences’ over real human preferences, but also mistakenly assume that an AGI is motivated by human-like thoughts and emotions. This makes us reliably underestimate the risk involved in engineering an intelligence explosion.

10. The True Prisoner’s Dilemma. What kind of jerk would Defect even knowing the other side Cooperated?

11. Basic AI drives. Why are AGIs dangerous even when they’re indifferent to us?

12. Anthropomorphic Optimism. Why do we think things we hope happen are likelier?

13. The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. How hard is it to directly program an alien intelligence to enact my values?

14. Magical Categories. How hard is it to program an alien intelligence to reconstruct my values from observed patterns?

15. The AI Problem, with Solutions. How hard is it to give AGI predictable values of any sort? More generally, why does AGI risk matter so much?

Part IV. Ends.

A superintelligence has the potential not only to do great harm, but also to greatly benefit humanity. If we want to make sure that whatever AGIs people make respect human values, then we need a better understanding of what those values actually are. Keeping our goals in mind will also make it less likely that we’ll despair of solving the Friendliness problem. The task looks difficult, but we have no way of knowing how hard it will end up being until we’ve invested more resources into safety research. Keeping in mind how much we have to gain, and to lose, advises against both cynicism and complacency.

16. Could Anything Be Right? What do we mean by ‘good’, or ‘valuable’, or ‘moral’?

17. Morality as Fixed Computation. Is it enough to have an AGI improve the fit between my preferences and the world?

18. Serious Stories. What would a true utopia be like?

19. Value is Fragile. If we just sit back and let the universe do its thing, will it still produce value? If we don’t take charge of our future, won’t it still turn out interesting and beautiful on some deeper level?

20. The Gift We Give To Tomorrow. In explaining value, are we explaining it away? Are we making our goals less important?

In conclusion, a summary of the core argument: Five theses, two lemmas, and a couple of strategic implications.

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If you’re convinced, MIRI has put together a list of ways you can get involved in promoting AI safety research. You can also share this post and start conversations about it, to put the issue on more people’s radars. If you want to read on, check out the more in-depth articles below.

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Further reading

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 4

William Lane Craig on facts, tracts, and things abstract

I’m grateful to Alex Rosenberg and William Lane Craig for taking the time to respond to my post, “Fact-checking the Craig-Rosenberg debate“. I edited in a few of Rosenberg’s comments from correspondence, but Craig’s public reply, “Fact-checking the fact-checker“, is more in-depth, and deserves a response in its own right. I’ll single out two points for special attention: historical methodology, and the idea of immaterial causation.

___________________________________________________________________

Scripture and scholarship

Craig writes of my

[…] breezy dismissal of N. T. Wright’s scholarly work because Wright is “a Christian apologist and bishop” and of the work of New Testament historians in general because they are allegedly Christians […]

I didn’t dismiss Christian scholarship. What I wrote was:

Craig doesn’t note that most New Testament scholars are Christians. (Are we to take it as evidence for the truth of Christianity that a lot of Christians happen to be Christian?)

Now, of course being a Christian doesn’t make it impossible for you to evaluate Christianity in a fair and skeptical way. I believe very strongly that the Earth is round, but that doesn’t mean that I’d be hopelessly biased in a debate with flat-Earthers. Agnosticism does not imply objectivity, and objectivity does not imply agnosticism. If anything, we’d be worried if most New Testament scholars weren’t Christians, since that would suggest that the historical evidence tended to make people less religious than the general populace.

But it’s also worth noting that Christian orthodoxy is not generally considered by historians the only possible objective interpretation of the evidence of the Gospels. And appealing to scholarly consensus here is misleading inasmuch as it has the guise of an appeal to independent authorities, as opposed to authorities who already came into the field accepting Christianity.

The charge was not that being Christian invalidates one’s scholarly work on Christianity. It was that, in the context of a debate with non-theists, it’s misleading to appeal to the authority of historians qua historians without mentioning that most of them came into the field already accepting the conclusion for which you’re arguing. (From childhood, no less!)

Suppose you’re debating a Muslim theologian who asserts that we can be confident that Muhammad is a prophet because virtually all Qur’anic scholars accept historical claims that provide powerful inductive evidence for Muhammad’s lofty status. If in the process he does not mention that most Qur’anic scholars are (and always have been) committed Muslims, then his argument risks deceiving people into thinking he’s adducing wholly independent grounds for accepting Islam. That’s so whether or not you ‘breezily dismiss’ Qur’anic studies itself.

If Craig’s point had merely been ‘There are a lot of very smart Christians who have carefully studied Christianity and still believe in it,’ I would have had no objection. Likewise, I have no objection to citing the specific historical arguments of Christian scholars, which can then be evaluated in their own right, without any need to consider the personal beliefs of the arguer. But when you’re citing the people themselves as authorities, their religious precommitments do start to become relevant, in the cases of Christian and non-Christian religions alike.

Craig: He thereby displays his unfamiliarity with New Testament studies and with the skepticism with which these scholars — which include among their ranks non-theists like Bart Ehrman and Jewish scholars like Geza Vermes who concur with my three facts — approach their sources.

I never suggested that all New Testament scholars are Christian. But Craig is doing what I wanted him to do in the debate, which is citing non-Christian authorities to strengthen his case — so I thank him for that.

That said, I should note that Craig is mistaken about Ehrman. Ehrman did claim that Jesus’ empty tomb was a historical fact in a 2003 lecture, but in a 2006 debate — a debate with Craig, available on Craig’s site — Ehrman said that he had changed his mind. Quoth Ehrman:

Paul said he [Jesus] got buried; he may simply have been tossed into a communal grave. I should point out that in some of Bill’s writings, he’s quoted a lot of my writings, and he’s taken them out of context, as I’ll show in a few minutes, because what he’s saying I’ve changed my mind to, I don’t agree with. […]

We don’t know if Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea. What we have are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story. We don’t know if his tomb was empty three days later. We don’t know if he was physically seen by his followers afterwards.

And Craig recognized this during their debate, saying,

Insofar as Dr. Ehrman now chooses to deny the honorable burial, the empty tomb, the appearances, he is in the decided minority of New Testament scholarship with regard to those facts.

We should keep in mind that Ehrman doesn’t deny “the appearances“, provided that dreams or visions would qualify as “appearances“. But in any case, Ehrman tells me he’ll give more details (and explain why he changed his mind) in his upcoming book, How Jesus Became God.
 

 
There are a number of further ambiguities that led to my charge of “misleading”. To keep Craig’s claims in context, I’ll quote much of his argument from the debate, adding numbers where I have questions or comments below.

Craig: God is the best explanation of the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth.[1] Historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place.[2] He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come. And as visible demonstrations of this fact, he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcism. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead.[3] If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands, and thus evidence for the existence of God.[4] Now, I realize most people think that the resurrection of Jesus is just something you accept — by faith, or not. But there are actually three facts recognized by the majority of historians today which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.[5] […] Naturalistic[6] attempts to explain away these three great facts, like “the disciples stole the body” or “Jesus wasn’t really dead,” have been universally[7] rejected[8] by contemporary scholarship.[9]

1. The best possible explanation, or just the best one anyone has yet come up with? And if the latter, is Craig further claiming that this is a good historical explanation, or merely that it’s not as bad as the alternatives?

2. It’s very unclear what’s being asserted here. Is Craig saying that no one prior to Jesus had ever claimed to speak in the name of a supreme deity?

3. Craig began by saying that “historians have reached something of a consensus“. But he doesn’t indicate where his summary of that consensus ends and his own views begin. If Craig doesn’t intend to suggest that there is a historical consensus that Jesus worked real miracles and was raised from the dead, then he should draw the line between the two more explicitly. And since there isn’t such a consensus — and if there were, it would make Craig’s subsequent argument superfluous! — drawing that line can only improve the clarity and persuasiveness of Craig’s real point.

4. This claim is too weak for Craig’s purposes. Craig needs the resurrection to not just be evidence for God, but exceedingly strong evidence for God. Framing the question as ‘Is this evidence or not?’ risks trivializing the discussion, since most things that make claims likelier only do so by trifling amounts. Perhaps that sounds nitpicky, but it’s especially important to make the strength of one’s claims clear when discussing probabilistic arguments.

5. In the past, Craig has conceded that among historians “it is controversial whether the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of those facts“. But he doesn’t mention this in the debate. Nor does he explain why, if historians understand the evidence Craig is citing so well, they are so reluctant to endorse Craig’s conclusion as the most reasonable historical hypothesis.

6. Be wary of false dilemmas. Craig’s hypothesis has to beat rival supernatural explanations, not just natural ones.

7. “Universally“? Is this hyperbole, or is it being claimed that no historian of early Christianity endorses any non-theological explanation of the facts Craig cites?

8. What does “rejection” mean here? Careful historians will assign rough probability estimates to hypotheses before picking some threshold that counts as ‘acceptance’ or ‘rejection’. So Craig might mean that historians assign a very low probability to each one of the “naturalistic” hypotheses to date — they don’t think any one is likely to be true. Or he might mean that historians who have looked at these hypothesis don’t assign a high probability to any of  them.

In the latter case, they may not have even considered whether they’re probably false, if they’ve only examined the evidence enough to determine whether they’re especially likely to be true. A paper ‘rejecting’ some hypothesis might simply be concluding that the evidence is too inconclusive to endorse the hypothesis, relative to general historical standards or relative to the rival hypotheses. If this is the case, then Craig’s argument will fail, since certainly ‘historians have not singled out any one naturalistic hypothesis as unusually plausible’ does not imply ‘each one of the naturalistic hypotheses is likely to be false’.

But there’s a further problem: Even historians who grant ‘each one of these hypotheses is likely to be false’ need not grant ‘it is likely that all of these hypotheses are false’. To make that leap is a probabilistic fallacy.

Consider a detective who thinks, ‘I’m sure that the killer is either the butler, the maid, or the professor; but I have no idea which of them did it!’ The detective might be extremely confident that the culprit is among those three candidates, but not at all confident in the guilt of any particular one. Or suppose I flip a fair coin ten times. The probability of any particular sequence of heads and tails (e.g., TTHHTTTTHH) is less than one in a thousand. But to conclude that it is likely for no sequence to occur, from the fact that it is not likely for any particular sequence to occur, would be absurd. In the same way, it is perfectly open to the naturalist to grant that no specific natural explanation is likely, without granting that a set-theoretic union of all the natural explanations (tomb robbers, or the women got lost, or the whole story came to an overenthusiastic follower in a dream, …, …) is unlikely too.

9. Lastly: Craig presents this as an argument for the existence of God. If we take ‘God’ to signify the Christian God, then one way for him to make his case would be to presuppose that there is some sort of deity, on the basis of his other seven arguments. The form of the historical argument would then be: ‘Given the anomalies surrounding Jesus, plus the fact that we know that some sort of intelligence created our universe, it is reasonable to conclude that this intelligence probably directly intervened in the events described by early Christians.’

On the other hand, if Craig thinks this historical argument could be used to independently conclude that some intelligence crafted the cosmos, then he can’t appeal to the other arguments as premises, and the inferential leap he’s making — from a few ancient manuscripts to the structure and origin of the entire universe — will become quite a bit harder to motivate.

___________________________________________________________________

Alexander Vilenkin

Immaterial causes and the Kalam argument

Craig: [O]ur blogger mistakenly thinks the theorem applies only to inflationary models, which is inaccurate, as the paper referenced above shows.

Craig is right. My thanks for pointing this out! And my apologies to any readers who took away from my post that Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s conclusion in “Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete” applies only given inflation. It holds more generally of any model in which the universe expands on average.

In the debate, Craig presents the Kalam cosmological argument as follows:

1. The universe began to exist.

2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.

3. Therefore the universe has a transcendent cause.

By the very nature of the case, that cause must be a transcendent immaterial being.

Rosenberg focused his attack on premise 2, but I would note that premise 1 remains deeply controversial among physicists. In response to the question “Did the universe have a beginning?”, physicist Sean Carroll writes, “Mithani and Vilenkin are […] willing to be honest about our state of ignorance: thus, ‘probably’ yes. I personally think the answer is ‘probably no,’ but none of us actually knows.” Carroll elaborated in correspondence:

[T]he BGV theorem refers to classical spacetimes, and the universe is not classical. That’s all that really needs to be said. Alex Vilenkin takes this classical result as a strong indication that the true quantum description of the universe also must have a beginning, but at best it’s suggestive. It’s absolutely plausible (and much more likely, in the view of many of us) that the actual universe is eternal, and the BGV result tells us that the classical description must break down, not that the universe must have had a beginning.

Carroll also notes, “The definition of ‘singularity in the past’ is not really the same as ‘had a beginning’ — it means that some geodesics must eventually come to an end. (Others might not.)” Craig has strongly disputed this. However, Vilenkin agrees with Carroll, though with the qualifier “most” in place of “some”. In response to Vic Stenger’s question “Does your theorem prove that the universe must have had a beginning?” (in The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning), Vilenkin responded,

No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning.

More specifically, Vilenkin wrote,

The theorem says that if the universe is everywhere expanding (on average), then the histories of most particles cannot be extended to the infinite past. In other words, if we follow the trajectory of some particle to the past, we inevitably come to a point where the assumption of the theorem breaks down — that is, where the universe is no longer expanding. This is true for all particles, except perhaps a set of measure zero. In other words, there may be some (infinitely rare) particles whose histories are infinitely long.

Still, my main interest is not in disputing Craig’s premises, but in clarifying what accepting his conclusion would really mean. Since Craig bases much of his argument on the work of Vilenkin and his colleagues, it’s important to keep in mind that Vilenkin himself thinks that we can physically explain our universe’s beginning. In “Creation of universes from nothing“, Vilenkin posits that an empty geometry, devoid of time, space, matter, and energy, could give rise to the universe as we know it.

Previously, Craig has objected that this emptiness would not count as “literally nothing“, hence that Vilenkin fails to explain “being’s coming from non-being“. But Vilenkin is free to grant that the physicalist has no such account. In the context of the Kalam discussion, the physicalist’s burden is to explain, not how something could come from nothing, but how a universe with a beginning could come from an unintelligent but beginningless source. Since Vilenkin’s vacuum is atemporal, it has no beginning. Hence the Kalam argument cannot be reapplied to it. Perhaps some other philosophical objection can show theism to be superior to this hypothesis. But it will still be the case that the Kalam argument fails, at least in the sense that it cannot motivate theism on its own.

Two other potential sources of serious misunderstanding are Craig’s appeal to “transcendent” and “immaterial” causes. There is an obvious sense in which all causes ‘transcend’ their effects — because no event is self-causing. But theorists might wish to deny premise 2 if the premise is taken to mean that something past-eternal couldn’t cause our universe by becoming our universe.

Physicists like Vilenkin are also likely to be wary of the imprecision of the term “immaterial“. This term is pivotal in Craig’s argument, particularly since for him the term “universe” is defined in terms of the material, as “the whole of material reality“. When I raised this concern, Craig responded that he was quite clear:

I am using the word in the ordinary language sense to mean “not material” or “non-physical.”

… Well, sure. My problem wasn’t with the ‘im-‘ prefix. It was with what we’re considering ‘material’ or ‘physical’ in the first place. What general criterion can we use to tell material things apart from immaterial ones? I’ll run through a variety of options:

  • (a) By “material” Craig means ‘made of matter‘, in the sense used in physics. So the universe is the totality of things with spatial extent and mass.
    • Objection: This would make most of physics — spacetime, light, and gravitation, for starters — immaterial. Craig clearly doesn’t mean this, because he wants to exclude physicsy things like these as possible causes for our world.
  • (b) By “material” Craig means ‘nonmental‘. So the Kalam argument simply says that all nonmental things have a beginning, and everything with a beginning must have a cause, so the first nonmental things must have a mental cause.
    • Objection 1: This would make Craig’s position on the mind-body debate trivial, since his rejection of physicalists’ claims that mental processes are ultimately physical would then be merely definitional. (If it weren’t definitional, that would mean he allows the possibility that something could be both material and immaterial, which is, to put it mildly, confusing!)
    • Objection 2: This would render incoherent the distinction between two categories of immaterial thing Craig recognizes: Minds, and abstract objects. If ‘immaterial’ just means ‘mental’, then we can’t even meaningfully talk about neither-mental-nor-physical things like numbers. So this can’t be what Craig has in mind.
  • (c) By “material” Craig means ‘part of our spacetime manifold‘. This matches Vilenkin’s own definition of “universe” as the totality of spacetime regions connected to our own.
    • Objection: This allows that other, disconnected spacetimes might be candidate causes for our universe. Craig might simply deny, on grounds of parsimony, that there are any such spacetimes. But it still seems strange to say that such things, if they existed, would be ‘immaterial’.
  • (d) By “material” Craig means ‘spatial and/or temporal‘. So other spacetimes, if such there be, are included in what Craig calls the “universe”.
    • Objection: Human minds are temporal, hence would count as ‘material’ in this sense. This isn’t inappropriate if the Kalam cosmological argument is meant to explain all of Creation (including the mental parts of Creation), but it does contradict Craig’s stated views on the nature of mind.
  • (e) By “material” Craig means ‘spatial‘. This captures well Craig’s intuition that abstract objects and minds (both human and divine) seem immaterial, as well as his claim that branes are “physical“.
    • Objection 1: Vilenkin’s arguments at most show that “material reality” has a beginning if “material reality” is defined in terms of (c). Vilenkin’s argument does generalize to expanding multiverses, but he is silent on the issue of whether all completely disconnected physical structures, if such there be, have beginnings. So if Craig has (d) or (e) in mind when he speaks of “material reality“, he will need new, independent arguments to show that this reality too must have a beginning.
    • Objection 2: What exactly does ‘non-spatial’ mean? If it means ‘lacking spatial extent’, then point particles might count as ‘immaterial’. If it means ‘lacking spatial location’, then human minds might count as ‘material’. (This will be especially problematic if we cash out divine omnipresence in terms of spatial extension or location.)
  • (f) By “material” Craig means ‘describable in the language of physics‘.
    • Objection 1: What gets to count as ‘the language of physics‘? If we define this too strictly, then we risk calling the posits of slightly nonstandard variants of physics ‘immaterial’. On the other hand, if we define it too laxly, we start to lose any principled way to deny materiality of, for example, the mental.
    • Objection 2: What about physical laws? Craig considers such laws abstract (hence immaterial), but it’s not clear in what sense they could be foreign to physical description.

Of these, I think criterion (e) is the best option, despite its problems. It gets a lot of work done and yet is very simple. But Craig explicitly rejects (e) in the “spatially extended” sense, so his view may be closer to (f). In that case, we can restate his Kalam argument:

1. Every existent describable by an adequately physicslike theory began to exist.

2. If all such things began to exist, then they must ultimately have a cause that is not physicslike.

3. Therefore there is something un-physicslike that is the ultimate cause of everything physicslike.

Expressed this way, in terms of (f), Vilenkin himself strongly rejects premise 1. Likewise if we revised this argument to unpack “material reality” through definition (b). In the (a) and (c) variants, Vilenkin would accept premise 1, but conclude that his empty geometry is an ‘immaterial cause’ in the requisite sense. And if we replaced the argument with one appealing to (d) or (e), Vilenkin would probably maintain agnosticism about premise 1, but would again insist that his empty geometry, being non-spatiotemporal, is an adequate ‘immaterial cause’ as defined. So all of these ways of formulating the Kalam argument either make one (or both) of the premises scientifically dubious, or make the conclusion acceptable to non-theists.
 
The Music of Gounod - a Thought Form from Thought-Forms, by Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater
 
Still, for the sake of argument, suppose we granted something akin to the (f) version of the Kalam argument above, and concluded that something alien to contemporary physics (like a mind, number, or free-floating law) were causally responsible for the physical world. Would this suffice for establishing that a mind is the cause?

Craig thinks so. He reasons that we know that numbers and laws are “abstract objects“, and abstract objects have no causal effects. Since no one has been able to think of an immaterial object that is neither mental nor abstract, the only reasonable causal candidate is mental. When I suggested that there might be other immaterial causes to choose between, like the Forms of Plato, Craig responded:

Platonic forms and free-floating laws are abstract objects, so I just have no idea of what other world-transcending causes he’s talking about. If he can give us such a candidate, I’ll add it to the list of candidates to be considered, but I have yet to see such a candidate suggested, much less one that is more plausible than a transcendent mind.

This response surprised me. Craig has written a great deal about what’s nowadays called ‘platonism,’ or realism about abstract objects. But Craig’s assertion here reflects a lack of familiarity with the core doctrine of Plato himself, the doctrine that the sensible world is a product of the eternal Forms. Against Craig 2013, I cite Craig 2009:

By the way, what passes for Platonism today shouldn’t be identified with what Plato himself actually believed. For Plato, the Forms do not seem to be at all causally impotent but shape the world to be as it is. The debate over so-called abstract objects is actually a very recent development of contemporary philosophy which arose only in the late 19th century.

The source of Craig’s latter-day lapse is likely an ambiguity in the terms ‘platonism’ and ‘abstract’. By ‘abstract object’ philosophers (including I and Craig) usually mean ‘something non-spatiotemporal and causally inert’. But some  philosophers use the term more loosely, to refer to anything non-spatiotemporal. Plato’s Forms are abstract in the latter sense, but not in the former sense; and it is only the former sense that is relevant to Craig’s rejection of abstract objects as causes. As Gideon Rosen writes: “Plato’s Forms were supposed to be causes par excellence, whereas abstract objects are generally supposed to be causally inert in every sense.”

A second source of confusion is that even though belief in abstract objects is often called ‘platonism’ or ‘platonic realism’, Plato himself was a nominalist, and not a platonist or realist. (Paul Spade notes, pp. 56-61, that Plato is probably a nominalist, not just about abstracta, but about universals as well. Plato’s Forms, as usually presented, are potent particulars.)

Most metaphysicians these days consider the actual Forms of Plato so implausible as to be of merely historic interest, in contrast to the vibrant debate surrounding abstract objects. Since these abstracta have a superficial resemblance to the Forms, and are taken more seriously, the name of Plato is appropriated as a colorful way of picking out abstracta. Whence Craig’s conflation of the two.

But why do modern philosophers dismiss the Form of  Duality in favor of the abstractum 2? Simply on the grounds that our universe is causally closed. Plato’s actual views are dismissed with a chuckle, while abstract-object ‘platonism’ is vigorously attacked and defended, because Plato’s Forms purport to ‘spookily’ intrude upon our everyday lives and in the very existence of our cosmos, while abstract objects kindly recuse themselves from the realm of empirical science.

But this is precisely the assumption someone arguing for a universe-begetting intelligence cannot grant. Either Craig is illicitly assuming the causal closure of the physical when it harms rival doctrines and then rejecting it when the focus shifts to his preferred posit, or he simply hasn’t taken the time to seriously assess any hypotheses invoking unintelligent immaterial causes.

My point in all this isn’t to defend Plato’s doctrines, or for that matter Vilenkin’s. It’s merely to suggest that Craig is far too hasty in moving from his conclusion of the Kalam argument to an invocation of transcendent minds, divine or not.

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Just the facts

Craig: This blog is not really fact-checking (which would have involved alerting readers to factual mistakes like my ascribing a quotation to Penelope Maddy instead of Mary Leng or my giving the date of Caesar Augustus’ death as AD 17 rather than AD 14) so much as it is entering into the debate itself in assessment of the arguments.

That’s true to an extent. I generally limited myself to evaluating the soundness of Craig and Rosenberg’s arguments, and not to putting forward novel arguments of my own for the broader topics under dispute. For instance, I didn’t weigh in with my own view on the historicity of Jesus, on the right interpretation of quantum mechanics, or for that matter on the existence of a deity. (The main exception: I provided an argument of my own in §10, mainly to give an example of what deductive arguments from evil should look like.)

So whatever I was doing, it wasn’t prototypical ‘fact-checking’, but it was still decidedly from the sidelines. And I think you can tell from the tone that I was mainly using the ‘fact-check’ idiom as a fun way to spice up a relatively long post. (After all, one of my checks was just an excuse to make a Scientology pun.)

For all that, I’d be very interested to see a deeper discussion about where to draw the lines between (neutral? objective?) ‘fact-checking’ and personally entering the fray. Is a fact-checker allowed to evaluate the validity of arguments, or only the truth of premises? Can she only evaluate trivial claims, or can she also question premises that are central to a debater’s whole case? How uncontroversial or obvious does a truth have to be in order to count as a ‘fact’? I don’t have easy answers to these questions myself.

However this discussion started, it’s now moving into increasingly interesting and important philosophical waters. I’d love to hear Craig’s and others’ responses to the new historical, methodological, cosmological, and metaphysical issues raised so far.

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Further reading
Craig, William Lane (2008). “Current Work on God and Abstract
Objects” Reasonable Faith.
Guth, Alan (2002). “The Inflationary Universe“. Edge.
Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo (2011). “Nominalism in Metaphysics“. SEP.
Rosen, Gideon (2012). “Abstract Objects“. SEP.
Posted on by Rob Bensinger 2

God is no libertarian

So the world was made by a perfectly benevolent, compassionate, loving God. Yet suffering exists.

Why would a nice guy like God make a world filled with so much nastiness? All these wars, diseases, ichneumon wasps—what possible good purpose could they all serve?

We want God to make our lives meaningful, purpose-driven. Yet we don’t want that purpose to be super depressing. ‘God is a nice guy from his own perspective, but a total asshole by all human standards’ would be a pretty unsatisfying theodicy, and a terrible way to fill the pews. So how do we square a good God with a wicked world?

The standard response is that being truly good requires that one love freedom. God is so good that he won’t interfere with human freedom by preventing suffering. That certainly sounds nice; we don’t want to make autocracy the highest good. But how can this work in practice?

The idea seems to be that we are somehow to blame for our suffering. God, then, is off the hook. We’re free to blame ourselves (rather than God) for whatever evil things befall us. What’s more, we’re free to credit God (rather than ourselves) for whatever good things we accomplish. In this way we can, if we wish, preserve the pure wretchedness of man and the pure excellence of God. We are free to translate the complexity of human experience into a crisp conflict between total sin and total virtue. But there are deep problems with this approach: The shape of our world seems profoundly unlike the shape we’d expect from a libertarian architect.

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First Problem: Natural evil limits freedom.

It’s clear that not all suffering stems from human action. If God had protected the 230,000+ victims of the 2004 tsunami, how would this have interfered with human freedom? Would it not, if anything, it have increased our freedom, by giving the tsunami’s victims a chance to live out their lives?

One might respond that the tsunami’s destruction could have been greatly reduced by human actions. Perhaps God gave us just enough power to save ourselves, and we simply did not employ it.

But blaming the victims simply does not work here. No matter what we had done, we could not have saved every life. And if some people were to blame for the level of devastation, surely those people should have been punished, not innocent bystanders. Which brings us to…

Second Problem: Human evil limits freedom.

If God loves freedom, why does he let people obstruct and enslave one another? Why does he allow oppressors more freedoms than the oppressed? Why not give us just enough freedom to control our own lives, so long as it does not infringe upon the freedom of others?

The problem of evil raises special concerns for individual freedom. You might claim, for example, that humans (and not God) are responsible even for natural disasters, because Adam and Eve introduced suffering and death into the world when they disobeyed God. But that is not a crime committed by every human being, such that every human deserves punishment for it. It is a crime committed by two particular humans. How can we justify punishing someone else for a perfect stranger’s crime? Certainly it is not my fault if I was born to a sinful father. We can’t choose our parents.

(To my knowledge, Origen is the only theologian to have ever resolved this problem. Unfortunately, later thinkers generally consider Origen’s views heretical, and even Origen falls victim to religion’s standard “blame the victim” mentality.)

Third Problem: Our freedom is physically limited.

It’s easy to say that God loves freedom by counting the hits (look at all the things he lets us do!) and ignoring the misses (the things we can’t do). But of course we aren’t free to do whatever we want. God created us in a very specific way, strictly limiting what we can will ourselves to do. We can’t fly merely by flapping our arms. We can’t will aches and pains to go away. We can’t even go directly to Heaven merely by willing it.

So what? What’s the problem? Well, we’ve granted that freedom isn’t absolute, that a good God would make beings free in some respects, but not in others. But now we are forced to explain why God limits our freedom in the particular way that he does. Why give us the freedom to make sandwiches and fire guns, but not the freedom to cure all diseases or teleport away from natural disasters?

If we can’t even begin to explain this, then ‘God loves freedom’ ceases to be a viable justification for suffering. The question is now why God loves this particular freedom (the ‘freedom’ to suffer even when we’d prefer not to) more than he loves rival freedoms (the freedom not to suffer!). A generic appeal to ‘freedom’ can’t even begin to address this question.

Fourth Problem: Our freedom is epistemically limited.

This is the problem of ignorance, a far deeper and thornier issue than the standard problem of evil. What can it mean to say that God respects freedom, when he obviously doesn’t respect informed freedom?

Freedom, in fact, seems quite meaningless when it is not informed. Imagine a child told to pick between two closed doors. Behind one door is a fierce tiger, and behind the other door is chocolate. If the child chooses the door that happens to have a tiger, can we blame the child for his messy death? Surely not.

Yet we, too, live in a world we scarcely understand. It is often claimed that God hides himself from us in order to give us the freedom to doubt him, to choose our beliefs for ourselves. But in fact God’s hiddenness has the opposite effect; it takes away from us our freedom—our freedom to make an informed choice. Since we do not know which religion, if any, is the correct one, we can hardly be blamed if we err. Yet theists assert that those who fail to find God will suffer (e.g., in Hell or merely ‘the absence of God’), and that they deserve to suffer.

Being forced to play Russian roulette, and then losing, is not the same as committing suicide. The freedom to guess is not freedom. It’s just a slavery to chance. Only the freedom to choose between options whose consequences we fully comprehend is genuine freedom, because only then do we really know what option we’re choosing. Yet clearly God did not create beings who fully understand their actions’ consequences. Least of all in the realm of religion.

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The notion of ‘freedom’ favored by our allegedly well-meaning deity, then, ends up looking extremely peculiar. God evidently only loves freedom when it can infringe upon (and be infringed upon by) others’ freedom, and when it is severely limited in seemingly arbitrary ways, such that we are not free to escape suffering in this life or to make informed choices. After qualifying what God prizes in so many strange ways, what evidence remains for the supposition that these preferences even slightly resemble what we call “morality” or “compassion” in the case of humans?

I can think of four possible responses.

  • To Problem 1: Perhaps God created a perfectly orderly world, and in such a world it was inevitable that some disasters would arise.

This doesn’t explain why God created the particular world he did, or why he created at all. It also doesn’t explain why God prizes abstract “order” more than human welfare. Couldn’t he create a world that naturally has typhoons, yet still intervene to save the people victimized by his natural order? The fact that buildings inevitably fall down sometimes doesn’t make it any less immoral to choose not to save people from falling buildings if you’re able.

  • To Problem 2: It’s not God’s fault that humans hurt one another.

The issue isn’t that God’s to blame for everything humans do. It’s that God chose to limit human freedom in one way, but not in another. He made us free to harm one another, but not free to be safe from others’ harm. What makes the former freedom more important than the latter? Why is the villain’s freedom prized above the victim’s? Even if God doesn’t directly cause every human action, he still chose which possibilities to leave open. That calls for explanation.

  • To Problem 3: If we could do anything, we’d be God.

This relies on a false dilemma. It’s not that case that God needs to either make humans omnipotent, or deny them the ability to escape suffering. He could easily give them that one ability, while continuing to deny them other abilities. This on its own would radically decrease the suffering in the world, and radically increase people’s freedom.

And, as an aside: What’s wrong with being God? God sure seems to like it!

  • To Problem 4: If we knew everything, we’d be God.

Again, we don’t need to be omniscient merely to know the consequences of our actions. God chose to create beings that are ignorant of almost everything. If such beings sin without fully understanding the consequences, they cannot ethically be held more responsible than God for what ensues.

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 8

Harry Potter and the Fuzzies of Altruism

This is a shorter version of a post for Miri Mogilevsky’s blog, Brute Reason.

Effective Altruists are do-gooders with a special interest in researching the very best ways to do good, such as high-impact poverty reduction and existential risk reduction. A surprising number of them are also Harry Potter fans, probably owing to the success of the EA-promoting fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, calls that nice inner glow you feel when you help people “warm fuzzies“. But it’s a common error to assume that everyone thinks and perceives the same way you do, and I’ve come to notice that not everyone who’s interested in charity and social justice gets identical “fuzzies”. People with the same humanitarian goals can differ, not just in their philosophy and tactics but even in their basic psychological motivations. So I decided to construct a taxonomy of fuzzies modeled after the four Houses of Hogwarts.

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slytherfuzzies — how it feels to save the world by improving yourself, mastering your own will, and achieving your personal goals. Slytherfuzzies are that self-esteem boost, that sense of being effective and just plain Awesome, when you successfully help people. At an extreme, people’s happiness is seen as a tool for achieving slytherfuzzies (or just Victory), rather than your drives being a tool to help others. Picture Gandhi cackling in a darkened, smoke-filled room, muttering, ‘All goes according to plan…’

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ravenfuzzies — how it feels to save the world as an intellectually stimulating puzzle. One helps people not so much out of felt empathy as out of boredom, or curiosity, or a conviction that happy, healthy human-style intelligences help make the world a more beautiful, interesting, and complicated place.

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gryffinfuzzies — how it feels to save the world from within a hero narrative, (e)utopian vision, or any sort of Moral Quest. A gryffinfuzzy can be as proud as a slytherfuzzy, but the grounds for pride are externalized — things are finally The Right Way, not necessarily my right way.

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hufflefuzzies — how it feels to save the world in the form of lots and lots of sick baby bunnies. Hufflefuzzies are warm. Personal. Social. Fuzzy. They’re probably the most common and essential source of altruism. They are units of reverse schadenfreude, of empathic joy, of emotional connection, solidarity, or belonging.

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In my own case, I seem to be mostly motivated by gryffinfuzzies. I find that surprising, because philosophically I’m much more likely to explain and defend my ethical views in terms of the value of empathy (like a hufflepuff bodhisattva), or the value of diversity (like a ravenclaw Feyerabendian), or just in terms of my personal preferences (like a slytherin existentialist). Apparently my core moral intuitions are quite distinct from my intellectualizations of morality.

What about you? What drives you to do good? What combinations of fuzzies do you experience, or would you like to? Do they vary for different kinds of charitable work? Do my groupings make sense to you, and are there any fuzzies I’ve left out?

Posted on by Rob Bensinger Aside 4

America’s anthem

AceTerrier has a disastrously interesting blog, Don’t Stay Up Too Late, on 20th-century pop music. Here’s his conclusion to an article on the evolution and context of 1940s American music:

“It is the national anthem, and it lies in waiting for the America that will someday sing it with one voice. Arthur only sleeps; he will return when Britain needs him most. So it is with Woody Guthrie and his most beautiful and dangerous song.

“But until then we have a lot of national anthems, as befits a nation of such size and variety, and the official one is the worst of them all, which is only fitting for a country that prides itself on its greatness in all things and loathes its government. Apart from its other routinely-mentioned defects — it’s unsingable, it’s about a minor war, and even the story told about its creation, which is the only thing it has going for it, isn’t true — “The Star Spangled Banner” is schlock enshrined as piety. Which should be no surprise — we’re a nation of hustlers and nouveau-riche climbers, and our taste is as suspect as our intentions. We make things and sell them; whether art is involved doesn’t impact the bottom line, and only vaguely interests us. We know what we like.

“The first national anthem, “Yankee Doodle,” probably should have been retained, its goofy air of cussedness and the cheerful fuck-you attitude that allowed Americans to adopt it after the British sang it in mockery remaining wonderful evocations of the American spirit that has persisted in all the great pop production that made America the cultural force for good it has been in the world: American music, comics, movies, television, and comedy has always been chasing after the deliriously bizarre image of “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” ever since the meaning of the word changed. But of course it’s not self-serious enough for the other American spirit, the prim and proper spirit, the one that wears the top hat that, in the elemental American gag, gets knocked off by a chance snowball. It’s those people, in every country, who demand real national anthems, ones that can only be sung by choirs in four-part harmony with big brass accompaniment, rather than whistled by a kid walking barefoot down the road.

“The other two early nineteenth-century anthems — “America The Beautiful” and “My Country, ’Tis Of Thee” — are far more coherent as tunes and sentiments, but they’re still too sappy, and one of them even borrows the melody off “God Save The King/Queen.” Royalist treason! but of course that too is part of America; few Britons can manage to be quite so Anglophilic as a certain breed of idealistic American, as nineteenth-century lecturers, writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and anyone who ever argued on the internet about Britpop all discovered to their profit (or detriment, depending). And then there are the anthems of the Civil War — “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic” and “Dixie” — both of which have great sentimental value and are calibrated to offend and annoy at least half the population of the country. The self-righteous abolitionist fervor of the “Battle Hymn” would, that end accomplished (and once they been emancipated, fuck ’em), move on to the next moral horror destroying the nation: alcohol consumption. Which obviously turned out well. As for “Dixie,” well, the sovereign irony of the slave-owning South marching to war singing a song written from the perspective of a free black man (even if he does pine for the ol’ plantation) is its own reward.

““Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing” combines the best of both worlds, the moral fervor of “Battle Hymn” and the democratic underclass perspective of “Dixie,” but the fact that none but black children are taught it (and not many of those, any more) has to date kept it from being embraced by the widest possible audience. And so into the twentieth century.

“The penultimate national anthem is, of course, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the one that still gets sung at seventh-inning stretches not because anyone wants to but because everyone is too afraid of being called unpatriotic to suggest cutting it and just doing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” which was good enough for our grandfathers, who kicked Hitler’s ass, for God’s sake, but I digress. In fact, the obnoxious omnipresence of “God Bless America” is a direct echo of the circumstances surrounding it: Berlin, who famously never wrote a song unless he felt its sentiment keenly himself, wanted to write a patriotic song to lift America’s spirits out of the Depression. The ghetto-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants who despite not being able to read music or play in more than one key became the most popular and beloved songwriter alive in America, he was honestly grateful to the country which had given him the opportunities which he, with a sharp-eyed hustler’s instinct for the main chance, had grabbed onto with both hands. “God Bless America,” especially as sung by the big, blowsy-voiced alto Kate Smith, became the de facto national anthem, especially once we got into the war and pietistic nationalism was the order of the day throughout popular culture.

“In New York, a fellow-traveling Okie who loved nothing more than reinventing himself, unless it was sticking it to capitalists, was sick and tired of hearing Kate Smith boom out “God Bless America” every ding-durned day on the radio, practically as regularly as a station identification. In fact the more he thought about it, the more pissed off he got. It was capitalist Republican humbug, and mawkish to boot. It was, in fact, better suited to a sentimental Eastern European parlor than to the grinning, wiry-muscled, cigarette-dangling, and dirty with the dirt of many roads America which he knew, or believed he knew; like most idealistic autodidacts, he believed implicitly in the truth of his wide experience. He’d write one better.

“He recorded “This Land Is Your Land” for Asch for the first time in 1944, and played and sang it everywhere he got the chance, encouraging others to do the same. It wasn’t formally published until the 1950s, and even then came with the copyright legend “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” (Woody really was from rural Oklahoma, but he embellished the nonstandardness of his dialect as much as possible out of perversity and a leavening sense of fun.) He snarkily subtitled it “God Blessed America,” accent on the past tense, meaning His work is done, it’s up to us to figure out and implement the best use of what we’ve been handed, rather than waiting on Biggest Brother to sort out our shit for us.

“But the real spirit of the song isn’t in its hail-fellow-up-yours rejoinder to Tin Pan Alley, or even in its infamous anti-capitalism verse (a version of which is included in this cut of the song, though not as direct as in some takes). In its broadminded embrace of the vastness and variety of the nation, it’s the first national anthem since “America The Beautiful” to describe patriotism as a love of the country rather than the civilization. It’s about the land, and the people on it, not the government or the military or the moral rectitude or even the culture, popular or otherwise. And Guthrie’s plainspoken directness even avoids the picture-postcard prettiness and sentimentalism of “America The Beautiful.” Instead of amber waves of grain (symbolizing the agricultural wealth of the Midwest), there’s a plain ribbon of highway; instead of fruited plains (which doesn’t even make sense, the plains are barren, that’s what makes them plains) there’s a golden valley. Everything, that is, exists in potential, not categorical, terms for Woody.

“And America at its best, at its most honest and fundamental core, is also a nation of potentiality. It’s why we developed film and comics and recorded music into such uniquely immediate narrative forms. To pluck (say) Cary Grant out of history, to capture and preserve him forever in The Philadelphia Story or Arsenic And Old Lace or Bringing Up Baby, is to give the finger to death and decay. The slow decline and sudden shock of nonexistence have no place in movies, except as part of an intelligible, sane moral order. Dorothy Parker’s bon mots can live forever, even as the witty pixie of the 20s becomes the alcoholic bitch of the 50s and 60s; Bing Crosby’s golden, reassuring burble on record can establish a corner of idyllic harmony in which he never abused his kids or fucked anyone over; Krazy and Ignatz can keep hurling bricks and sonnets at each other into infinity even as George Herriman’s ashes blow across the pink mesas. Movies and records and yes printed material too establish miniature universes in which the unresolved tensions and categorical evils of this one need not apply; all art is artificial, and all pop is art. […]

“I have come within the last several years to accept the fact that I love my country (the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of a youth spent abroad with a clear view of her cruelty and arrogance needs no further elaboration), and it is the music she has given the world that has reconciled me to her. This, I thought, should be explained. I have attempted to do so.

“But I would not be misunderstood. […] I no more love what she was than I love what she is; and what she is — a nation of self-satisfied gluttons addicted to shrill nonsense and perfectly willing to destroy the planet in the name of convenience and profit — is of all possible nations the least lovable.

“But of course that is not all America is. Nothing is ever all America is. So because I love her potential, I love her infinite variety; every version of America is possible in such space. From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters. From California to the New York island. The sparkling sands of her diamond desert. The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling: either alone is intolerable, smug fatness or apocalyptic despair, but together they sum up the contradictions, the extremes, the combination, in every imaginable ratio, of great evil and great good, which means America. As it means everywhere. To be a true patriot, as G. K. Chesterton noted, is to embrace all the earth in one’s fierce pride of place, because our common humanity is, at last, our only refuge from the darkness which howls within us and without.

“This is why I listen to the music of the 40s, and of every era, why like any good history obsessive I rage against the forgetting of anything however trivial; the more opportunities we have to connect, to observe and embrace our common humanity in all its difficulty and squalor and pretension and meaninglessness and fragile beauty across the street or across the ocean or across the ages, the better we’ll be. This is the very opposite of the art snob who thinks that exposure to the Great Works of Humanity makes him a better person; it’s exposure to humanity period that does it, and that humanity is present in everything.

“America, fuck yeah. Copulation and affirmation. Ain’t nothin’ more American, ’cause ain’t nothin’ more human. Happy trails, motherfuckers. See you round the bend.”

 

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Posted on by Rob Bensinger 0

Moral theory is for moral practice

Sam Harris has argued that we should treat situations as morally desirable in proportion to their share of experiential well-being. In a debate, William Lane Craig objected:

On the next-to-last page of his book, Dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his “moral landscape” would no longer be a moral landscape. Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people, or evil people, alike. […] The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world, the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation.

I think the real problem here isn’t that it could be moral to make evil people happy. Harris and I gladly bite that bullet. The deeper worry is that, in a world teeming with pathological sadists, torturing a minority might well increase aggregate psychological welfare. Yet it would be absurd to conclude that torturing an innocent in such a world is moral.

This is a perfectly fair argument. But Harris simply responds, “Not a realistic concern.”

Why the lack of interest? Because, I think, any claim that the English-language word ‘good’ means ‘well-being’, picking it out across all possible worlds, is beside the point for Harris.

A world of sociopaths or sadists would be trapped in a valley of the moral landscape. Fixating on a few tiny hills at the bottom of that valley is missing the big picture, which is that the truly moral act would be to cure the world of its antisocial tendencies, not to indulge them. It’s sort of ‘moral’ for a doctor to spend most of her time making delicious pies for her rapidly deteriorating patients. I mean, baking for others is a good deed, right? But it’s immoral on a deeper level if it distracts the doctor from diagnosing or treating her patients. Craig’s example is alien enough to do some violence to an exact identification of ‘good’ with ‘well-being’, but it does nothing to undermine the enterprise of improving psychological welfare, because it misses the landscape for the hills in much the way the baker-doctor does.

So what is  Harris’ goal in The Moral Landscape ? He seems to want to establish four main theses:

1. Positive experience is what we value.
All the things we care about are instances of experiential well-being.

2. So we should value all positive experience.
Our strongest unreflective desires will be furthered if we come to value such experience in general, however and wherever it manifests. For this binds all of our values together, encouraging us to work together on satisfying them.

3. Morality is about satisfying that universal value.
Since this is the most inclusive normative project we could all legitimately collaborate on, and since it overlaps a great deal with our most rationally defensible moral intuitions, it makes consummate sense to call this project ‘morality’.

4. So science is essential for getting morality right.
The best way to fulfill this valuing-of-experienced-value is to empirically study the conditions for strongly valenced experience.

I’m very skeptical about 1 on any strong interpretation, but I’ll talk about that another time. (EDIT: See Loving the merely physical.) Though Harris places a lot of emphasis on 1, I don’t think it is needed to affirm 2, 3, or 4. Suppose we learn that some people really do value living outside the Matrix, keeping natural wonders intact, promoting ‘purity‘, obeying Yahweh, or doing the right thing for its own sake, and not solely the possible experiential effects of those things. Still Harris could argue that, say…

  • … those goals form a much less consistent whole than do the experiential ones. Perhaps, for instance, subjective projects come into conflict less often than objective ones because we have separate mental lives, but only one shared physical world.
  • … education or philosophical reflection tends to make those goals less appealing.
  • … those goals make dubious metaphysical assumptions, in a way experiential goals don’t.
  • … those goals depend for their justification on experiential ones.
  • … those goals causally depend on experiential ones.
  • … those goals are somehow defective variants on, or limiting cases of, experiential ones.
  • … those goals are unusually rare, unusually temporally unstable, or unusually low-intensity.
  • … those goals are so different from experiential ones that they can’t all reasonably be lumped into a single category.

Some combination of the above conclusions could establish that experience-centered goals form a natural group that should, for pragmatic or theoretical reasons, be discussed in isolation. Once we’ve got such a group, we can then argue that our most prized goals will be furthered if we generically endorse the entire category (2), and that these goals will be further furthered if we reserve ethical language for this category (3). 4 will then fall out of 2 and 3 easily, as an empirical conclusion about the usefulness of empiricism itself.

On my view, then, the real action is in the case for 2 and 3. What is that case?

Why value value?

It’s important to highlight here that Harris doesn’t think everyone already generically values all positive experience. It would be a fallacy to deduce ‘everyone values every positive experience’ from ‘everything that’s valued by anyone is a positive experience’.

[I]n the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone. I am not claiming that most of us personally care about the experience of all conscious beings; I am saying that a universe in which all conscious beings suffer the worst possible misery is worse than a universe in which they experience well-being. This is all we need to speak about “moral truth” in the context of science.

So Harris is proposing that we change our priorities. They should change in pretty much the same way our ancestors’ linguistic, political, and intellectual practices changed to affirm the scientific character and universal value of health.

Why change? Because it will allow us to better collaborate on the things we already care about most. Again, why should we prize health in general, as opposed to caring specifically about the health of certain groups of people, or certain body parts? Why not have medicine focus disproportionately on our right legs, disregarding our left legs almost completely? Well, I suppose there are no unconditional, metaphysically fundamental reasons to value health in general, or to build sciences and social institutions dedicated to understanding and improving it. But it’s simpler that way, and it benefits us both individually and collectively, so… why not?

Valuing every experienced value, in proportion to its intensity and frequency, is egalitarian in spirit. Practically democratic. That doesn’t make it ‘objective’ in any mysterious cosmic sense. But it does make it an extraordinarily useful Schelling point, a slightly arbitrary but stable and fair-minded convention for resolving disputes.

Of course, if we just think of it as an arbitrary convention, without ascribing it any importance — if we ‘mere‘ it — then the whole point of the convention will be lost. If no one had any respect for democracy, democracy would dissolve overnight. It may be very important for the practice of valuing value that we adopt moral realism or consequentialism as an absolute law, even if the justification for doing so isn’t so much philosophical first principles or linguistic definitions as our lived, pragmatic concern for our own and others’ actual welfare. Good conventions save lives.

It’s because we do in fact have conflicting desires that it’s important to have a general framework for resolving disputes, and Harris’ is a surprisingly flexible yet sturdy one. On Harris’ view, we do factor values like nepotism and egoism into our calculus, and try to help even sociopaths live a joyful, fulfilling, beautiful life — within limits.

What limits? Simply that it come at no cost to everyone’s joy, fulfillment, and beauty. In that respect, the system is more fair than a democracy, since unpopular values get equal weight; and at the same time less exploitable than one, since that weight is determined by psychological fact, not by popular opinion.

So most malign values are quelched or stymied not because they’re intrinsically Evil but because they don’t scale well. They don’t interact in such a way that they form sustainable ecosystems of positively valenced experience. On Harris’ view, we shouldn’t block or assist sadists and war criminals merely because it pre-reflectively ‘feels righteous’ to do so; for our sense of righteousness can go horribly astray. Rather, we should do so because an ecumenical ‘value all values’ project demands it, and because abandoning this meta-value means abandoning our best hope for fully general cooperation between sentients.

What’s on the table is less a moral theory than a humanitarian superproject. Harris reinterprets our language of ‘ought’ and ‘should’ not with the goal of solving Kantian paradoxes but with the goal of defining and motivating a long-term civilizational research program, all while bringing our intellectual drives and traditions into a more intimate conversation with our moral drives and traditions, at the individual as well as the societal scale.

Why call this ‘morality’?

For a person who wrote a book about meta-ethics, Harris is remarkably unconcerned with meta-ethics. He takes note of it only to do a bit of conceptual and rhetorical tidying up. At all times, his sights remain firmly fixed on applied ethics, on politics, on, well, real life.

[T]he fact that millions of people use the term “morality” as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

But if there’s real disagreement here, why speak in terms of ‘ought’ and ‘bad’ at all?

The problem isn’t that those are univocal, clearly-defined terms whose entrenched meanings Harris is flouting. The more realistic worry, rather, is that they’re horribly confused terms with only a limited amount of consistency within and across linguistic communities. Folk morality is a mess. Heck, academic morality is a mess. And folk meta-ethics and folk normative ethics (and their academic counterparts) are particularly confused and divergent — far more so than object-level morality. So if Harris’ goal is to inject some clarity and points of basic consensus into this conceptual cacophony, why enter the fray we call ‘ethics’, with its centuries of accumulated obscurity, at all? Why not just invent a new set of terms for what he has in mind, like ‘flought’ and ‘flad’? Then, stipulatively, we could have our flobligation cake and eat it too. If he did that, you can be sure that you’d see fewer people treating ‘but you’re just defining morality as “the maximization of well-being”‘ as an objection.

Although it’s tempting to reboot ethics and start over with a clean slate, I think that the risks should we completely forsake the moral conversation are too dire. Moral language is just a language. (What’s ethical remains ethical, whether we call it ‘ethical’ or ‘flethical’, or ‘unethical’, or ‘linoleum’.) But language matters. Our intuitions are language-shaped. Even if we say that ‘florality’ or ‘neuro-eudaimonics‘ is far more humanly important and conceptually deep than traditional ‘morality’, people raised on the ‘morality’ lexicon will still reliably misconstrue how high the stakes are, misconstrue even their own preferences, if we toss out moral language.

Many [highly educated men and women …] claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose in any case. They think we can combat human evil all the while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are completely unwarranted. It is always amusing when the same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or of female genital mutilation, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that mortal relativism does nothing to diminish a person’s commitment to making the world a better place.

Moreover, our traditional talk of goodness and badness has some very useful features, like its correlation with our deepest concerns and its built-in universality. Certainly we could redefine morality in, say, egoist terms. ‘Justice’ and ‘ought’ could be made to refer to the speaker’s interests, as opposed to the overall interests of sentient beings. But then it would be less useful as a language, since the meanings of the terms would vary from person to person, like pronouns do, and since we already have adequate ways to express personal preferences.

Ethical discourse is our only established way to concisely refer to aggregate preference satisfaction. So streamlining the expression-conditions of this discourse, stripping it of the parochial or metaphysically dubious associations it has in certain linguistic communities, may be a very valuable project if we have a sufficiently important candidate meaning to adopt. Harris thinks that psychological well-being meets that condition.

I’ve emphasized the revisionary nature of Harris’ project, because I want to make it clear why objections like Craig’s are beside the point. Harris’ goal is to provide a framework for thinking and talking clearly about humanity’s most important (i.e., most widely and deeply valued) problems and possibilities. His goal isn’t to provide a novel theory that can ground all our naïve normative intuitions, ordinary prescriptive language, or sophisticated ethical theories, because he thinks that all three of these are frequently useless, internally inconsistent, even outright contentless.

Everyone has an intuitive “physics,” but much of our intuitive physics is wrong (with respect to the goal of describing the behavior of matter). Only physicists have a deep understanding of the laws that govern the behavior of matter in our universe. I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being).

At the same time, I don’t want to suggest that Harris’ framework is all that ethically novel or strange. We really do care with unparalleled ferocity about suffering, rapture, beauty, tranquility, and all the other qualities of experience Harris is interested in. And our everyday moral intuitions and conventions really do orbit the distribution of extreme forms of these experiences.

My qualification is that that’s a contingent fact, and it’s not the core reason Harris is so interested in this project. If our moral intuitions had turned out to be consistently detrimental to our psychological welfare, Harris would have advocated the destruction of morality, not its reconceptualization! But, for all that, the conservatism of Harris’ proposal is very much worth keeping in mind. If nothing else, it shows that Harris’ project isn’t as difficult as it might seem. All we need is a small but vocal pool of intellectuals and public figures on our side, just large enough to reverse the current cultural trend towards blind relativism and lame nihilism.

Harris’ aim, then, isn’t to give a fully general semantic theory of what the word ‘good’ means in English, or to provide metaphysical truth-conditions for all our intuitive judgments. It’s to recommend a simple framework for collaborating on issues of deep humanistic import. It’s to repurpose an increasingly unproductive discourse to express the urgency of scientifically inquiring into the nature of anything and everything that matters to us. And then actually doing something about it.

Regimenting our concept of “morality” with simplicity will make it easy to teach and explain the value of value, regimenting it with elegance will make it easy to theoretically and pragmatically defend the value of value, and regimenting it with egalitarianism will ensure that we do not disregard any of the core concerns of any of the beings capable of having concerns. If Harris’ own proposal is not ideal for this aim, still it seems clear that something has to fill the void that is modern ethical thought, lest this void continue to encroach upon the things we love.

Further reading:

Posted on by Rob Bensinger 17